The Warsaw ghetto uprising

A Polish-Jewish hero

THE 19th of April 1943, exactly 70 years ago, saw the first insurrection against the Nazis in occupied Europe: the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The event symbolises both Jewish courage and Jewish suffering. For Poland, its anniversary is also a resonant event in the country’s ongoing reconnection with its Jewish heritage and fight against anti-Semitism.

Last week, more than a hundred volunteers showed up to work on cleaning and restoring the dilapidated Jewish cemetery, perhaps the strongest visual testament to the fact that this city was once one of the largest Jewish centres in the world – and is no more. Almost none of them were Jewish. They told me they had come out of a sense of duty.

The event had been listed on a website devoted to the anniversary commemorations, which are extensive. From now until the May 16th when the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street was destroyed, marking the end of the uprising and effectively of all Jewish life in Warsaw, the city hosts ceremonies, exhibitions, concerts and lectures devoted to Poland’s Jewish heritage.

The new Museum of the History of Polish Jews is co-ordinating much of the proceedings. It has used the occasion to officially open as an educational centre even though its permanent exhibition is a year away from being ready evidently hoping its impressive architecture and cultural programme will trump the dubious symbolism of its emptiness.

The guest of honour is Simcha Rotem (pictured above), nom de guerre ‘Kazik’. At 89, he is the only former member of the Jewish Combat Organisation (ŻOB) still in good enough health to make the trip. I met him in Israel, where he has lived since shortly after the war, last month. Though tired and in low spirits, he told our correspondent he had decided long ago that if he could possibly make it to this anniversary, he would, regardless of what kind of commemoration was planned for the sake of the memory of his comrades who are no longer alive.

Some of those comrades did live for years after the war though—thanks to Kazik. His is an astonishing story of courage and luck in hellish circumstances. As a 19-year-old, fair-haired ruffian from the Warsaw district of Czerniaków, Kazik did not look Jewish. For that reason the insurgent leader, Marek Edelman, chose him to go to the Aryan side and try to organise a rescue operation for the Jews trapped in the ghetto, already in flames.

After a week on the Aryan side, Kazik finally found two sewer workers who thanks to much goading with vodka in one hand and a pistol in the other, showed him an underground route back into the ghetto. Emerging on Zamenhofa street, he found nothing but smouldering ruins.

It’s at that point that Simcha Rotem’s testimony ends Claude Lanzmann’s epic documentary, Shoah: he believes he is the “last Jew” and has nothing left to do but wait for the Germans. But that is not what he did.

Returning to the sewers, he hears voices: a dozen or so fighters. They say there are more hiding elsewhere, and he tells them to gather and make their way through the sewers to a manhole under Prosta Street, just outside the ghetto.

Simcha Rotem to this day does not know exactly people he saved: “A few dozen. Do you think I had time to count them?” he exclaims. After meeting the group in the sewer, he had returned to the Aryan side and organised for two vans to pick up the survivors at dawn. Only one van arrived, at 10am, and its driver had to be held at gunpoint to prevent him from driving off while the Jews were coming out of the manhole.

After it seemed that no-one else was emerging from the manhole, Kazik told the van to move off. Against all the odds, the few dozen made it to safety the forests north of Warsaw. Yet some had remained underground. Simcha Rotem has had to live with the idea that perhaps he could have done better. But today he says he feels it was the only decision he could make in the circumstances: “The Germans were 100 metres away. It was broad daylight. It was now or never.”

Asked whether his memory of that moment is still vivid today, Simcha Rotem is almost offended: “It is not the sort of thing a person could forget”. His anger at the Nazis is still very much alive, too: “I regret in a way that we didn’t get revenge on the SS. Because they were not conscripts, they chose to do what they did. So they were murderers. And murderers should be hanged. They were not people, but animals walking upright.”

Fear that the world could forget the horror of the Holocaust, or that it could happen again, animates those who do remember it ever more as their numbers dwindle. Irena Boldok, who escaped from the Warsaw ghetto aged eight or nine, gives talks in schools and elsewhere as a member of the Children of the Holocaust association. She speaks gloomily about the experience: “some of them understand, not many. It’s hard to talk to fourteen-year-old kids. It is like a history lesson for them.”

According to the Polish psychologist Barbara Engelking, one reason the ghetto uprising did not happen sooner is that Jews in the Warsaw ghetto maintained the illusion that they might live: the death camps were simply beyond human imagination. With fewer and fewer survivors around to remind us of the horrors of the Holocaust, marking the anniversaries of its key events becomes an ever more important way of ensuring that we don’t forget something that was so unthinkable at the time.

After the Wannsee conference in 1941 at which the "final solution" was decided, hiding Jews became punishable by death anywhere in the areas directly controlled by Nazi Germany – not just in Poland, but also e. g. in Germany proper.

When discussing events which happened in Poland during German occupation 1939-1944 it’s worth bearing the following facts in mind:

I) Poland never formed a collaborationist government

Unlike the governments of several other European states, no Polish government ever helped dispatch its Jewish citizens to death camps.

II) The Polish government in exile in London repeatedly alarmed the world about the extermination of Polish Jews and urged for action

3 May 1941
Polish government sent an official report to all Allied and neutral states informing about mass crimes committed by Germans on Polish Jews and pleading for immediate action against Germany

This report of the Polish government in exile was published in "Polish White Book" and translated into English, French and Spanish. It was widely distributed in USA and Britain.

November 1942
On orders of the AK, Polish courier Jan Karski risked his life to deliver a report and microfilm proving the extermination of Jews in German-occupied Poland.

10 December 1942
The Polish government issued an appeal to the Governments of United Nations demanding immediate action against Germany to prevent the Holocaust

This demand of the Polish government prompted the declaration read by Eden in parliament two days later, on 12 December (the extent of Allied "action" in the matter)

January/February 1943
Representative of the Polish government Jan Karski reported personally to several leading Allied politicians, including British foreign minister A.Eden and US ambassador A. Drexler-Biddle. Later he spoke to F.D.Roosevelt. Polish attempts to prompt Allies to action remained in vain, Karski’s report met with incredulity or indifference.

III) Under German occupation not only Jews, but Poles as well, were victims of of mass extermination and genocide.

The difference was that Germans destined the entire Jewish population for total extermination, and the Polish population for extermination/slavery/deportation.

During the occupation Germans killed or caused the death of nearly 3 million Polish citizens of Jewish descent, and about 2 million non-Jewish Poles.

- a massive terror-apparatus had been installed there
- the country was home to the largest number of European Jews
- lying beyond Germany, on the edge of Europe, heavily guarded and occupied Polish territory was away from the eyes of the world

V) In occupied Poland Germans introduced a death penalty for giving food or shelter to Jews.

Any Polish person hiding Jews risked not only their own life but that of their entire family including small children. This is the price many Polish families paid (eg. Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma, who were shot along with their 6 children for hiding Jewish neighbours; Wiktoria was nine months pregnant at the time)

More than 6,339 Poles have received the title from Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, the most of any nation.

In fact, only a small fraction of Poles who helped Jews during the occupation were ever recognized.

16 and 17 September 1942
Official announcement published in leading underground AK bulletins "Rzeczpospolita" and "Biuletyn":

"Simultaneously with the tragedy the Polish society, (…) for nearly a year now, monstrous and systematic slaughter of Jews is taking place on our land.

This mass murder has no parallel in the history of the world (...) all atrocities known from history pale in the comparison. (..) Incapable of effectively preventing the occupant, AK leadership in the name of the entire Polish nation protests against this butchery."

VII) The underground Armia Krajowa – subordinated to Polish government in exile - set up a special agenda to aid Jews (codename "Żegota") This organization was unique in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The "Żegota" leadership consisted of representatives of Polish political parties, as well as Jews hiding on the "Aryan side".

"Żegota" oversaw and coordiated the activities of Poles who volunteered to help Jews in spite of the enormous risk involved. It is assessed that 500,000 to 1 million Poles actively tried to help Jews during the German occupation.

This said:

Nobody denies that in Poland – as well as all other occupied countries – there were people who profited from blackmailing or denouncing Jews - as well as Poles - to the Germans. However, post-war statistics of the Israeli War Crimes commission established that only seven thousand out of a population of 20 million collaborated with the Germans.

In order to truly appreciate this refusal to collaborate bear in mind the food ratios in occupied Poland. Eg. in Warsaw 1941 Germans were allocated 2613 calories. Poles were entitled to 667 calories. Not quite enough to survive.

My interest in this topic is that my father, a Pole, was sent to Auschwitz. Auschwitz in fact was founded in June 1940 as in instrument to oppress Poles (the first Jewish transports began arriving in March 1942). The Economist writes that 'For Poland, its anniversary is also a resonant event in the country’s ongoing reconnection with its Jewish heritage and fight against anti-Semitism', typically setting the unfair context that Poland is only about anti-Semitism. But the true historical Polish theme is its religious tolerance, for which it was famous and which is exemplified by its 'General Charter of Jewish Liberties' issued in 1264 and which gave Jews autonomy and cultural and religous freedom. This charter was reaffirmed by every Polish king for 500 years until Poland itself was taken over by Russia, Prussia and Austria. (Poland in the Middle Ages also allowed the free worship of Islam and during the Reformation declared that religion was a matter of personal conscience, thereby avoiding the religous wars of the period.)The Charter led to the flowering of Jewish life and culture in Poland. In World War II, the Poles were the only people under German control to earn the death penalty (decreed in October 1941) for helping Jews as the Germans were so exasperated by the extent of this. Historians estimate that at least 40,000 Poles were executed under this, the penalty extending to the entire family, even children. (Hence, the drivers of the two vans mentioned in the article were risking their lives and the lives of their entire families). Poles smuggled about 2,500 Jewish children out of the Ghetto and placed them, again in the context of risking the death penalty, with Polish families. It was the Polish resistance that sent word of the destruction of Jews to the West. None of this is ever given as context. It is of course the Germans who destroyed the Polish link to it Jewish community. I believe that one must acknowledge Poland's pro-Semitism which is very much a motivator of Poles' interest in its Polish-Jewish history.

Silly games? I'm talking about basic historical facts concerning Europe's most recent history that every schoolchild should know, and you're talking about an anonymous acquaintance of an acquaintance as supposed evidence of something quite contrary to basic historical facts.

Basic historical facts include the truth that pre-war Germany had racist and anti-Semitic laws and actually a much longer history of anti-Semitism, all of which easily explains why more Jews were living in poorer Poland than in far wealthier Germany.

You are right, it would be stupid for The Economist to try censoring truth.
But, how is going in Switzerland. Are you still making a lot of money of dead Jude accounts of the money they smuggled from around the world to put it in secret numeric accounts in Swiss banks?.

I have come to hate the word "Holocaust", because it has become just a word, and has lost whatever power to shock it ever had. Some things need to be spelled out, and never hidden behind a name. We ought always to speak directly of the systematic murder of millions of people, more Jews than any others, but millions of others as well. And we ought to make sure people know that this was just the beginning, that Germany planned to kill at least 30 million people in Eastern Europe and the Western USSR to clear "living space" for German farmers, whose bounty would make Germany forever secure from the starvation caused by the Royal Navy's blockade in WW1.

Why doesnt this article mention numerous attempts of the polish underground to help the uprising?

All of the mentioned people had to be held at gunpoint, yet there were several large scale attempts to join the fighting. For example the "Bystry" team has entered the ghetto taking hard losses.

Please bear in mind that all the weapons that were in the ghetto were supplied by the polish underground! And all the members (including "Kazik" survived only because of the help of the ordinary Poles, a help for which there was only one punishment, death)

It is shameful that such newspaper as The Economist can not show a more balanced view of this great act of heroism...

If this was such common practice, there would be plenty more German names on the Yad Vashem list of the righteous among the nations. As it is, there are 525, and of those 525 the vast majority survived the war. Most were able to save Jews on account of their privileged status, members of the aristocracy or the Nazi party. Of the few that were actually killed during the war, at least two were killed because they were Catholic priests, while others because they were active members of foreign resistance organisations, therefore not strictly on account of the help they provided to Jews. I know of one righteous German, well Austrian recruit actually, who was killed by the German military for saving 250 Jews. His name was Anton Schmid and he was executed in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1942. Such people should always be named. Can you name the acquaintance of your German Grandmother?

Congrats to the authors and the staff of this column. The rigging of history done by you in this article makes a fine example of today’s PC alteration of facts proving Orwellian Ministry of Truth’s dabbling with history a child’s play.

In the entire article there is but a single instance when the word ‘Germans’ appear, and it is placed in a context that suggest a neutral to positive connotation. Since ‘Kazik’ was waiting for the Germans, the readers of this North Korean style propaganda piece is not really able to grasp all the horror of the situation the Jewish rebel found himself in. They would only know that the resistance fighter ‘waited’ for the Germans. That must have been a good thing, right? I mean, after all the fighting, blood, gore and horror, he was still waiting for the Germans.

When it comes to the Poles however, the article is ripe with the instances of their willing cooperation with the mythical Nazis in the destruction of the entire ethnic group. Furthermore everyone knows the death camps were Polish because they were built, in the words of immortal Stephen Fry, “on the Polish side of the border.” The article is reminiscent of G.B. Shaw’s dismissal of Stalinist Russia starving its own citizens in Ukraine in the 30’s or the report of the Red Cross from their visit to the German hoax camp in Theresienstadt:http://www.scrapbookpages.com/CzechRepublic/Theresienstadt/Theresienstad...

Reading again and again Mr Orwell’s 1984 I cannot help but wonder how insightful and foreseeing the man was. One can only marvel at the degree to which his description of erasing facts and inculcating new ones in the heads of conscious people done in the matter of seconds is so accurate. Here are the examples of just a few instances of preparing the fertile grounds for the Orwellian type engineering of history:

Someone very famous told once that a lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth. I heard that the British don’t have friends, only interest, but this is absurd. What did you trade the historical truth for? To lift the blame entirely from the Germans and place it squarely on the Poles, your onetime allies, why do you hate us so much? The Poles could be accused of anti-Semitism, indifference towards the plight of the Jews; but to blame them for the Holocaust? There is not a single word about the real perpetrators of the crime in the Warsaw Ghetto. In the light of the articles to which the links I posted above it seems that an organized, shrewd campaign is being played out to dehumanize the peoples from Eastern Europe and disgust people at the mere sight or even the mention of them. A perfect example is provided in the form of many articles from tabloid press:

Dear Joshua Tree,
I quote Prof Richard Lukas in 'Poles remember the Holocaust as he discusses the risk of the death penalty Poles faced for helping Jews: "Poland was the only occupied country where this was done."
As for Germany itself, the incident of one person being killed does not prove that there was a law imposing the death penalty for aiding Jews.
I further quote Yad Vashem: "The sizable corpus of laws, decrees and ad-hoc regulations that made up the Jewish Sonderrecht (special law) in Nazi Germany did not include a single reference to help rendered by Germans to Jews. The closest thing was a decree by the Head Office for Reich Security, dated October 24, 1941, that prescribed “on educational grounds” up to three months imprisonment in a concentration camp to persons of German blood who openly displayed friendly relations to Jews. This should be contrasted with the situation obtaining in Eastern Europe, where after October 1941 Poles caught helping Jews had to reckon with the death penalty – often together with their entire household."
Thus there was no death penalty in Germany for helping Jews and Poland was the only country subjected to this. I do think we can now end this discussion now.

Karski was an official Polish Government-in-Exile delegate who met President Roosevelt personally, as well as Supreme Court member Felix Frankfurter, Rabbi Stephen Wise and many other very important and influential people in the USA. It's all well recorded because the meetings were official.

Having spent the last week in Warsaw, it can only strike me as at best extremely odd that only 70 years ago the city in essance did not exist. The city currently, in my opinion, is one of the most developed cities in Europe, certainly from the ones ive seen and ive seen quiet a few. There are nice glassy buildings everywhere, lots of shopping centres, lots of restaurants, nice parks, in fact, excluding a few monuments, plaques and memorials you would never think it happened here. There are literally no signs anywhere the city was destroyed. To me it now appears as a very modern, very wealthy, very well built up city.

Glory to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto! Not only those of the Jewish Combat Organisation (ŻOB) but also the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW). Anyone who fought the Germans in Warsaw in April 1943 was a hero. Fighting the Germans there and then was suicidal - the Battle of Kursk was still many months away, and where is Kursk in relation to Warsaw?

Dear Joshua Tree,
I am sorry but your assertion is not correct. There was no death penalty in Germany, nor France, et al., for aiding Jews. The Wannsee Conference minutes (Protokoll in German) do not mention this at all.Proper research will beat this out.

We had a moving celebration on Friday here in Warsaw. I especially liked the two spotlights into the dark sky over the city - one from the newly opened Museum of the History of Polish Jews (over 7000 visitors on the first day of operation!), the other from the The Warsaw Rising Museum. You can see the lights herehttps://www.facebook.com/1944pl?_fb_noscript=1

The lights were ment as a tribute to the heroes of ghetto uprising. From one hand they symbolized the unity of Poles and Jews today and bonds between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles formed during some 800 years of common Polish states' history, (un)broken by the German Third Reich.

From the other hand - two two light-beams, intersecting over Warsaw Rising Museum, memorize that Warsaw is the city of two uprisings of the WWII. The first urban uprising in German-occupied Europe - which was Warsaw ghetto uprising, and the largest anti-German uprising of World War II,which took place in 1944.

Europe's pre-war 9 million strong Jewish population mostly lived in what until 1795 had been the Polish-Lithuanian "Commonwealth of both Nations" which included present day central-eastern Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Latvia. It is those people who were the primary targets of a murderous Nazi German racist ideology which targetted them for extermination, to be followed by the Poles, other Slavs and Roma. That is precisely why the extermination camps (killing factories) and earlier mass shootings were located there. For the Germans it was simply a matter of industrial logistics, killing the victims where they lived. Nearly 6 million Polish citizens,20% of the total population (10% of gentile Poles, 90% of Polish Jews), mostly civilians, died as a result between 1939-45, the majority killed by the Germans and others by Germany's Soviet Russian ally between 1939-41.

German occupied Warsaw and its surrounding region had Europe's largest German created and walled-off Jewish Ghetto, encompassing the north-western quarter of the city centre and containing anything upto 350,000 Polish Jews at any one time. Their transportation to the main killing sites at Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau was carried out to April 1943 to the point that only about 55,000 people remained in the walled-off Warsaw ghetto.

Young members of several Jewish resistance groups in the Ghetto rose in revolt 70 years ago against their German oppressors in a hopeless fight that they knew would be to the death, in defence of their own humanity. And for that they should be honoured and remembered by all of us.

Their revolt was an example to others, in the Białystok ghetto and in several of the concentration and extermination camps such as Sobibór. And also in August 1944 the remaining three-quarters of the city of Warsaw revolted against the German occupier in a unsuccessful battle that lasted 63 days which ended in well over 200,000 deaths. Some of the few Polish Jews who survived the Ghetto Uprising also fought in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

We should remember them all, that they aren't just statistics but real people with parents, grandparents, children, cousins and friends who were murdered simply for what they were, their humanity being denied to them by a racist ideology implemented by other "ordinary people" themselves German fathers, brothers and sons. Never again!

Dear Johsua Tree,
Israeli research including those that done by Yad Vashem have concluded that there was virtually no Polish collaboration with the Germans. What aberrations did occur are in fact beyond statistically insignificant.

In this story, the word "German" is used exactly twice, and both instances happen to be quotes - one direct and one reported. Neither of the quotes "makes it quite clear" that the Ghetto Uprising was against German occupiers, nor, for that matter, that there were any German occupiers present.

There is a huge, pink elephant in this room of yours: the whole article is embedded in the heinous war crimes of the German Nazis, and yet Germans/Nazis are not referred to *once* in the context of what they did. We only learn that there was a "Nazi-occupied Europe" (oh, so the mythical Nazis occupied all Europe, including Germany, Austria, the Switzerland, Poland, etc., right?), that insurgents were "in hellish circumstances" (what does it mean?), were "held at gunpoint" (by whom?), were struggling "against all the odds" (why?), and, a part of a quote, that the SS "chose to do what they did" (meaning what?).

I fully agree with @polnishe untermensch -- the piece reads like a piece doctored by Orwell's Ministry of Truth, thoroughly cleansed from any references to Germany, Germans, and their acts. Next time, please summarize Milton's "Paradise Lost" without any references to Satan.